Three of the many localities across the United States that have seen elements of the housing crisis: Jackson, Wyo.; San Francisco, Cal.; and Lynn, Mass.

Across the country, a growing number of cities are grappling with problems stemming from high housing costs. Once confined to large urban centers, the symptoms of an affordability crisis are appearing in cities of widely varying size and geography. High costs are also hitting a broader segment of the population – concern for affordable housing is no longer limited to low-income households. Solidly middle class professionals such as nurses, teachers, and first-responders are struggling to rent or buy housing in the cities where they work. For low-income households, high-housing costs force impossible choices between buying basic necessities or paying rent, and heighten the risk of housing instability and homelessness.

As the gravity and economic cost of this national crisis grow, a federal response seems both appropriate and overdue. Yet while federal resources are a key piece of the puzzle for housing low-income households that the private market leaves behind, federal action is not sufficient. Effectively addressing the root causes of high housing costs requires local governments to play a leading role.

The good news is that local leaders have a range of policy tools at their disposal. Their challenge is to develop comprehensive and balanced housing plans that are responsive to local conditions and contain clear, measurable goals. To help local governments create these plans, the NYU Furman Center and Abt Associates recently launched LocalHousingSolutions.org, a resource for local housing policy grounded in the guidance of the National Community of Practice on Local Housing Policy.

A comprehensive and balanced strategy to tackle high costs requires the development of both market-rate and subsidized housing. The private market will never create housing for the lowest-income households, since the cost of developing and operating homes for this population segment is still higher than the rents these households can afford to pay. Thus public funding and support are essential to build and preserve subsidized housing. Federal resources are the primary vehicles for financing subsidized housing, but local policy plays an important role in allocating these limited funds to maximize their effectiveness. State and local policy makers can also use land-use powers to encourage or require the development of affordable units and have numerous options to generate additional revenue that can be used for affordable housing.

It is also critical, however, for localities to reduce barriers to new supply more generally. In a well-functioning market, increases in demand are met with increases in supply that moderate price increases. Yet the housing markets in most high-cost cities, towns, and counties do not work this way, leading to an insufficient supply of new housing. To improve housing affordability, community leaders must adopt policies that encourage the production of additional housing units. For many, the most important step is to change land-use regulations to house more people on the same sized lot .

Establishing a clear, predictable development process that minimizes the need to seek special approvals or permits in order to build new housing is also important. The uncertainty associated with the approval processes slows down the development timeline, and can prevent new development from happening at all. More efficient land-use and a streamlined process can change a housing market from one that is fundamentally broken to a normally functioning market where increases in demand result in new supply that can moderate rent growth across the board and minimize the government support needed to write down rents in subsidized housing.

Finally, a comprehensive and balanced housing strategy should incorporate measures to promote housing stability and improve the quality of existing housing and neighborhoods. The same market demand driving high housing costs can price out longtime residents, perversely risking a public backlash to many of the essential strategies that can keep costs in check. It is thus vital that local policy makers directly address these displacement fears with a strong commitment to housing stability through programs focused on eviction and foreclosure prevention. In addition, by expanding access to capital for both single and multifamily homeowners, local governments can help keep older housing stock in a state of good repair.

Housing affordability can seem like an intractable problem – an issue where local policy makers are powerless in the face of national economic forces. The reality is quite different. Using existing policy tools and funding sources, local governments can advance housing strategies that promote affordability, stability, quality, and choice.

Mayor de Blasio has made great strides toward a fairer city. But the biggest step, the authors say, remains to be taken.

New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio has made great strides in carrying out his oft-repeated pledge to make the Big Apple “the fairest big city in America.”

He made universal pre-kindergarten a reality, played a key role in raising the city’s minimum wage, slashed the number of unconstitutional, raced-based police stop and frisks, and made it easier for low-income New Yorkers to access critical anti-poverty benefits.

In many of the nation’s big cities, hunger and homelessness remain rampant. But given that de Blasio is enacting so many progressive policies to combat poverty, why are these problems still pervasive here?

The reason is actually quite simple: Even with recent modest wage hikes, too many people simply earn too little to cover the soaring costs of child care, food, transportation, health care, and most critically, housing.

An oft-heard refrain among many elites is that earning $200,000 annually in New York City “doesn’t make you rich.” So where does that leave all those who earn the median household income of $55,322? The reality is that those pulling down six figures or more don’t have a problem affording housing – but those with incomes below the median certainly do.

Landlords typically require that tenants have gross incomes that are at least 40 times the monthly rent, but that target is obviously far easier to reach for wealthy rather than working class families. While there is a vacancy rate of nearly 9 percent for apartments affordable to households earning $200,000 yearly, for those earning the median income, the rental vacancy rate for housing they can afford is less than 3 percent. For those who earn even less – the 670,000 extremely low-income households in our city who need a place renting for less than $800 per month – the vacancy rate has plummeted to just 1.2 percent.

The most effective step – by far – that the city can take to reduce hunger and homelessness is to make more deeply subsidized affordable housing available, especially for those currently without homes. The goal of Mayor de Blasio’s Housing New York 2.0 plan is to create or preserve 300,000 affordable units by 2026, with only five percent of those units set-aide for homeless families. But if the mayor’s plan is to even come close to addressing the actual need in our city, that figure must be doubled to ten percent, or 30,000 units. Moreover, 24,000 of those units should be created through new construction to increase the supply of available apartments for homeless New Yorkers.

While about half the city’s households earn less than $42,000 per year, only 25 percent of the housing units set-aide in the city’s plan are for families in this bracket. At least half the housing should be set-side for such struggling working families on top of the homeless set-aside units.

New York has the greatest cultural institutions and most welcoming diversity on the planet. But when tens of thousands of our neighbors cannot afford to put food on the table, cannot afford a roof over their heads, then we are truly failing to fulfill that most important function of a city: to be a true home. Mayor de Blasio, who pledged to end the “tale of two cities,” has a historically unique opportunity to finally reverse the course of this decades-old crisis. We hope he will live up to all his promises.

Joel Berg is the CEO of Hunger Free America and Giselle Routhier is the policy director at Coalition for the Homeless.

]]>https://citylimits.org/2018/09/17/cityviews-de-blasio-can-fulfill-his-progressive-promise-by-retooling-his-housing-plan/feed/1CityViews: Why Quibble Over Who’s ‘Homeless’? We Can Afford Housing as a Right for All.https://citylimits.org/2018/07/25/cityviews-dont-quibble-over-who-counts-as-homeless-make-housing-a-right-for-all/
https://citylimits.org/2018/07/25/cityviews-dont-quibble-over-who-counts-as-homeless-make-housing-a-right-for-all/#respondWed, 25 Jul 2018 13:29:34 +0000https://citylimits.org/?p=2616872

DoD

A Harpoon missile, valued at $1.2 million each, is fired from the USS Shiloh in 2014. With that kind of money to blow up, the author argues, the U.S. can afford to do more on housing.

What does it mean to be homeless? Does it mean that you live on the street or can it mean you live on someone’s couch? Is the homelessness rate going up or going down? As with all public policy matters, the devil is in the definitions. There’s a bill moving along in Congress called the Homeless Child and Youth Act that’s trying to expand the definition of “homeless,” which is causing an interesting, if distracting, debate within the housing community. (Rachel Cohen has a good recap at CityLab.)

This debate matters a great deal to a lot of homeless people that need help. Just exactly how many people are homeless depends on what you consider homeless. There is a finite amount of federal funding for homelessness services and where we send these funds impacts a lot of peoples’ lives, so it matters.

The bill is designed to expand the definition of homelessness to capture people, particularly children, who don’t live on the street or in shelters, but don’t have their own reliable or safe homes (maybe they are doubling up with family, maybe they live in an abusive home). Right now these people are not considered homeless by HUD standards (although other federal agencies do consider them homeless) and are therefore not eligible for assistance (more on this later.)

The debate comes down to who gets help given our limited resources: the truly, chronically homeless who might take a longer-term intervention or the housing insecure who might just need a short-term intervention? It’s a Sophie’s Choice-type trade-off that all sides of the political spectrum with a dog in this fight can debate in good faith.

I’ve been a longtime volunteer for the HOPE count, which is the main federal effort to count unsheltered homeless, so I care a great deal about this debate too. But I’m more interested in where the sausage is made: the nature of politics that surrounds public policy. Often times in America, our politics frame public policy debates in strikingly narrow terms that shroud the values that should be expressed, leaving us with false choices masked as hard-fought compromises.

Housing as an issue suffers a lot from this and the current debate over the definition of homelessness is a perfect example. Of course no one is “pro-homelessness” but the accepted scope of the debate has the practical effect of making everyone pro-homelessness. Why? Because the debate isn’t about ending homelessness. And it should be. Because we can.

Let’s start with a simple premise: We are the wealthiest nation on earth. We can afford our public policy goals. The federal budget is $4 trillion. That is plenty of money.

However, our political system has spent about $5.6 trillion on war over the last 18 years and will spend another $2.3 trillion on a tax cut over the next 18 (give or take.) These are choices our political system has made.

Just as going to war in the Middle East and cutting taxes for corporations are choices, so too are these. Our political system has decided not to provide basic needs.

Not because we can’t afford them. Don’t ever believe that bull. Of course we can afford them. Obviously. None of this is new.

This brings me back to the homelessness bill. It is a case of politics framing, and, frankly, distorting–a public policy issue that should be very simple : end homelessness. Anyone that needs housing assistance gets it.

Make housing a right. It is that simple.

It’s scandalous that we would rather blow up homes (and you know, people) in foreign countries than supply them to anyone who needs them in ours. We could probably still afford to do both, but the scandal scandal of all is our war-making. Of course this opinion is rarely taken seriously by “serious” people, which also shows how broken our political premises are.

It’s scandalous because we should feel the moral obligation to provide shelter, but don’t. It’s scandalous because we have the means to do so, but choose not to. It’s scandalous because there are countless sound economic arguments that providing guaranteed housing reduces long-term public spending in other things like healthcare, unemployment, and even criminal justice.

This bill accepts all three terrible premises. Sure, naming something after children makes it easier to build political support for the homeless, but it shows that our definition of the deserving poor continues to narrow and excludes adults suffering with disabilities, addiction, or just poverty. Even children aren’t doing it for a lot of people anymore.

Sure, expanding the definition of homelessness could mean reaching more people who need assistance, but it still accepts that only 1/4 Americans who are even eligible (under any definition) get any. Even if some programs have seen an increase in funding, others haven’t, and most people don’t get help.

And it doesn’t raise the most obvious and scandalous point: that America has no problem guaranteeing housing assistance, if it’s for wealthy people. Every homeowner is eligible for the mortgage interest deduction and the American taxpayer pays around $70 billion a year providing it. We spend $134 billion overall on subsidizing homeownership. Remember that when politicians say we can’t afford to end homelessness.

It is clear that our politics are broken. Our public and civic health have continued to deteriorate as a result. Bills like this one are important in their own right, but its low ambition betrays a lack of moral vision and energy that should shock any American.

But there is hope. There are many candidates, notably New York City progressives Alex Ocasio-Cortez at the Congressional level and Julia Salazar at the State Senate level who are running on housing as a right. Even Senator Kamala Harris is belatedly getting in further on housing more than traditional Dems have (ironically based on similar work by Rep. Joseph Crowley).

Politicians who support housing as a right get what many activists get: The only way to fix our politics is to reject the premises that they rest on. Activists have noticed, but more importantly, everyday people have noticed. It’s not enough to write bills yet, but, for the first time in a long time, it sure feels like that vision and energy might be on the way.

There were a lot of competing priorities to be resolved in this year’s roughly $170 billion New York State budget, which by Friday morning was in the very last stages of negotiation. With a $4.4 billion deficit hanging over Albany, legislators said there wasn’t a lot of leeway for new spending this year.

Still, given the severity of the state’s affordability crisis, housing advocates demanded their legislators take strong action to support and protect renters. According to the Coalition for the Homeless, New York City’s shelter population yet again reached an all-time high of 63,101 people in January.

As details of the final budget emerge, it’s clear that there will be a few modest wins, but nothing of the magnitude that housing activists say is needed to address the rent crisis, as well as some language on state oversight that is concerning to some advocates.

Piloting a rental voucher program

Housing advocates have long called for the creation of Home Stability Support, a state-funded voucher program that would pay the difference between the current shelter allowance of public assistance and the fair market rent for an apartment (the reasonable rent determined by HUD). Sponsor Assemblymember Andrew Hevesi has envisioned a program that would begin in year one with a $40 million allocation, ramping up over five years to an annual $200 million. Such a program, he tells City Limits, could serve 30 to 40 percent of the 80,000 public assistance recipients throughout the state who are in danger of becoming homeless.

The senate and assembly each ended up including $15 million for a new rental subsidy pilot program in their one-house budgets, and the final budget also will include that $15 million. The pilot will supplement the difference between shelter allowance and 100 percent of the fair market rent for up to four years—an improvement above many other existing rental subsidy programs, which provide only an 85 percent reimbursement of the fair market rent, forcing families to pay up more, Hevesi says.

$1.1 million will go to Rochester in Monroe County, which will provide vouchers for about 40 households, and another $13.5 million to New York City, which will serve about 200 households, with the remaining funds to be used to contract with non-profits that will evaluate the program. But the program is intentionally not called Home Stability Support, so as not to give the public the impression that the envisioned subsidy program had been achieved.

“I’m happy that we’re able to help 240 households. I am frustrated that we are not able to stop the increasing growth of the homelessness crisis,” Hevesi tells City Limits. He says that given the deficit cap and the governor’s historic opposition, the legislatures decided it was more feasible to try a small pilot, but that next year he’d continue to fight next year for the full Home Stability Support program.

Still, some advocates are frustrated by the small allocation.

“It’s disappointing on a lot of levels,” says Paulette Soltani of Vocal NY. “If we don’t even have our most progressive leaders going up to bat against Governor Cuomo, then the people’s house isn’t actually fighting for the people.”

A gift with strings attached for NYCHA

While details are still being finalized, as of last night it appeared NYCHA would receive $250 million and that Albany would give New York City the right to use a “design-build procurement process,” which could speed up repair times by allowing the same contract to include both design and construction services. At the governor’s insistence, the budget will also likely include an independent monitor to oversee NYCHA’s operations.

This comes after weeks of feuding between the mayor and the governor over who’s responsible for NYCHA’s woes.

Earlier this month the mayor also criticized the governor for not releasing $250 million allocated in the state budget in the last two years (the governor’s office contends NYCHA was slow to come with a plan for the funds).

$250 million is only a quarter of what the Upstate Downstate Housing Alliance has called for: They want to see the state allocate $1 billion annually to the authority.

Supportive housing plan chugs on

Last year, the governor released funding for the first 6,000 units of his 20,000-unit supportive housing plan. Some advocates want funding for more of those 20,000 units released immediately. Others have said that the state needs to commit additional dollars to funding operating contracts for the first 6,000 units of supportive housing.

According to Hevesi, the Senate in fact tried to decrease the operating funding for supportive housing in the social services budget, but that in the final budget operating levels will be flat. He says that next year there will be a fight to allocate funds for more of the 20,000 units.

By press time, City Limits had not determined whether there would be any additional funding for operating contracts within the budget for the Office of Mental Health. [See below for update.]

Unclear funding for tenants with HIV

Some advocates wanted to see funding to ensure that New Yorkers living with HIV and at risk of homelessness paid no more than 30 percent of their income (the city already provides such a program through the HIV/AIDS Services Administration or HASA). Cuomo did include funding in the final budget, but made the program optional for localities, and the funding mechanism is, by multiple accounts, nebulous.

“It’s based off of Medicaid savings and they’re still arguing about how you calculate those savings,” says Hevesi, adding, “I think it’s a good thing, but my concern about that program is that…if it’s just optional for counties, counties are going to be unlikely to do it.”

“We’re then going to have to keep fighting to make it better,” says Soltani.

Governor assumes power over homeless outreach

Shelly Nortz of the Coalition for the Homeless has in the past raised concerns about the governor’s seeming interest in requiring cities to remove mentally ill homeless people from the street against their will.

At the governor’s instance, the final bill includes language that allows the state to deny large amounts funding for things like shelters, cash welfare benefits and rent subsidies to a district that “fails to develop, submit, or implement an approved outreach plan or an approved homeless services plan or to develop or submit homeless services outcome reports consistent with those requirements promulgated by the Office of Temporary and Disability Assistance.”

Prior to now, localities have not had to submit outreach plans to the state—and the Office of Temporary and Disability Assistance has not yet issued any requirements about outreach. Nortz is worried the governor will use this new language to eventually force cities to remove mentally ill homeless people from the streets.

“Frankly, it’s infuriating,” she says.

And no, no changes to rent regulations.

It was a long shot, but some tenant advocates asked, why wait until rent regulations expire in 2019 to make them stronger by eliminating loopholes that allow rent stabilized units to become market rate?

That was far from most legislatures’ mind this year, but it will be another item on the list for next year’s legislative session.

Update: According to Nortz, the Office of Mental Health budget will include $10 million for supportive housing operating costs, far less than what advocates wanted.

]]>https://citylimits.org/2018/03/30/housing-advocates-see-small-wins-some-threats-in-state-budget/feed/1CityViews: Government Can Close the Parole-to-Shelter Pipelinehttps://citylimits.org/2018/03/29/cityviews-government-can-close-the-parole-to-shelter-pipeline/
https://citylimits.org/2018/03/29/cityviews-government-can-close-the-parole-to-shelter-pipeline/#respondThu, 29 Mar 2018 17:15:28 +0000https://citylimits.org/?p=2262684

Xamreb

Clinton Correctional Facility in Dannemora, N.Y.

Every year, 26,000 people are released from prison on parole and come home to New York City. More than 75 percent have histories of substance use and/or mental health needs; many are from abusive or neglectful homes as children and then “graduate” from institutional care into juvenile facilities and adult incarceration.

More than half of people released on parole after serving time for felonies are homelessness and end up in large, dehumanizing barracks-style shelters rife with violence and drug use. These are the very issues that they must overcome to successfully reenter the community. Because of a tangle of federal, state and city regulations and funding decisions, the already limited housing alternatives available to homeless or very low-income individuals are far more limited for people coming home after incarceration.

The consequences are dire. Many stay in the city shelter system at a daily cost of $100 to over $300 depending on the provider. They get pushed out the door in the morning, roam the streets and come back at night, only to be kicked out again the next day. Many relapse into substance abuse. Many are re-arrested or violated on their parole, sometimes on a minor technical violation, and they end up back on Rikers Island where taxpayers pay a whopping $742 a day for those accommodations.

Rikers or a shelter? Neither is a good alternative. Not for community safety. Not for taxpayers. Not for anything.

Surely there’s a better way.

At The Fortune Society we have a program that works for a lot less money than it costs to warehouse someone in a shelter or on Rikers. Called “The Castle,” it’s located in West Harlem and is home to 62 individuals who are homeless and formerly incarcerated.

Read our 2017 investigation

Homecoming with Hurdles: Housing, Health and Work after Incarceration

Residents are required to be involved in 35 hours of constructive activities every week. They undergo daily drug screening. Each person living in our house is involved in group and individual counseling. They get mental health services and substance treatment services. They also get a lot of love, along with high expectations that most live up to.

There is an absolute rule of no violence and no threat of violence. Although many of our residents have violent convictions, we run one of the safest buildings in the City, and we do it without metal detectors or high-security.

We expect the residents to be positive, contributing members of this community – and they are. They transition from our emergency housing phase into our transitional housing. And then, over 80 percent move to permanent housing or other successful placements.

What we do costs between $110 and $130 a day – $200 cheaper than some shelters.

Government should be aggressively funding such a cost-effective and beneficial program and looking to replicate it everywhere.

But, according to the federal government, people getting right out of prison who have nowhere to live are not considered homeless and don’t qualify for housing programs supported by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development – a primary funder of homeless housing programs nationwide. This means that every homeless person coming out of prison on parole must first either live in the street or in a shelter to be eligible for HUD-funded housing. A lot of bad things can happen on the street or in a shelter.

Similarly, while we applaud Mayor de Blasio for his commitment to creating 15,000 units of permanent supportive housing over the next few years, these apartments are reserved for chronically homeless people. Because they were locked up and not in the shelter system, people leaving prison are ineligible even if they are elderly with mental health needs and physical disabilities and top the scale in terms of vulnerability.

Funding for housing these individuals is cobbled together from numerous sources. It’s like an alphabet soup jigsaw puzzle trying to match the strict eligibility and funding requirements with the right population—often unsuccessfully.

The solution is clear. Government, at all levels, must recognize that placing more than half of those released on parole in shelters creates a crisis whose human and financial cost is incalculable. The criteria to support eligibility for housing programs should be based on vulnerability and need, not on some arbitrary definitions.

Right now, we are locked in a lose-lose scenario: We spend more only to create more crime, pain and desperation. Being smart about reentry is a win-win proposition: we can spend less, do more good, save lives and make our communities much safer.

JoAnne Page is the president & CEO of The Fortune Society, one of the nation’s most respected nonprofit organizations serving and advocating for formerly incarcerated individuals.

Routhier says the administration must be more ambitious, but acknowledges that the city is likely to continue to have a large shelter population even if bolder local housing policies are pursued.

New York’s homeless shelter numbers—a consistent source of alarm over the last five years—have shown some signs of stabilizing. The average number of families with children in the system has been lower in each of the past eight months than over the comparable period the previous year and the average number of adult families has leveled off so far in 2018.

But the number of single adults continues to climb steadily. And there are still an average of 2,000 more families with kids in the shelters now than were there during the first months of Mayor de Blasio’s tenure in 2014.

“It’s OK to say it’s stabilizing,” Giselle Routhier, the policy director at the Coalition for the Homeless told Ben Max of Gotham Gazette and this reporter Monday on the Max & Murphy podcast, “but it’s stabilizing at record levels.”

To truly turn the tide against homelessness—to borrow a phrase from the homeless strategy re-set the administration put out in early 2017—New York is going to have to embrace bolder solutions, Routhier says, including wider use of newly created affordable housing, public-housing apartments and Section 8 rental vouchers than de Blasio has contemplated to this point.

Routhier gives the de Blasio team credit for establishing new rental voucher programs to replace those cut by the city and state in 2011, the loss of which started the huge spike in shelter numbers that characterized the end of Mike Bloomberg’s tenure and the first years of de Blasio’s. But she says it remains challenging to find apartments where landlords take the vouchers and where they are sufficient to meet the rents charged, even in far-outer-borough neighborhoods.

On the use of NYCHA apartments and Section 8, she acknowledges de Blasio “has gone from nothing to something,” re-establishing a link between city shelters and federal housing resources that the Bloomberg team had severed for ideological reasons.

Not that de Blasio’s housing policy doesn’t have its own questionable ideology. Like many housing advocates, Routhier contests the administration’s insistence on designating substantial numbers of apartments for families with six-figure incomes. The mayor has argued consistently that the housing crunch affects families up and down the income ladder, and that the city has an obligation, both moral and economic, to offer help to a broad section of the city. But Routhier and other advocates argue that the market is better equipped to serve such families than scant city resources.

While political heat over homelessness often burns de Blasio, Gov. Cuomo and the state budget are also under fire. By forcing the city to eat more costs for supporting homeless shelters, Albany is hampering the city’s ability to solve the problem.

Ayana Reefe, the Head Start Director and Early Learn Coordinator at Grand St. Settlement, said the IEP process could be frustrating for parents. 'It's already difficult for them; it's a sensitive topic, for them to even understand their child has a disability.'

Young students and committed teachers fill the classrooms and hallways of the Grand Street Settlement‘s preschool, located on the bottom floor of a building in NYCHA’s Baruch Houses complex on the Lower East Side. Schools like this are critical to Mayor Bill de Blasio’s endeavor to expand pre-K access to all New York City children. However, the staff at Grand St. has noticed a rise in a particular part of the pre-K student population.

“One thing for sure,” Gracianna Rosias, the organization’s disabilities coordinator, says, “is that we do have more families this year who are in temporary housing.”

As a part of the city’s universal pre-K push, the Department of Education mandates that all children four years old by the end of a calendar year are eligible for enrollment (Mayor de Blasio also announced a push to expand the mandate to the city’s three-year olds last April), and the DOE has also promised available pre-K seats for children living in homeless shelters, even if parents do not apply.

This push for universal pre-K seemed to benefit housed and homeless children alike. According to the Institute for Children, Poverty and Homelessness, pre-K enrollment among all students jumped by 25 percent between the 2011-12 school year and SY 2015-16. The jump in homeless pre-K student enrollment was even more pronounced, at 49 percent.

However, the number of homeless students in the city’s Preschool Special Education program dropped by 33 percent in that same time period, according to a February 2017 ICPH report, even as overall enrollment in preschool special education jumped by 13 percent. The disquieting trend illustrates the challenges the city faces as early childhood education enrollment continues to rise.

According to the ICPH analysis of SY 2015-16 data, only 35 of the more than 6,550 homeless students enrolled in pre-K were in special education – a share that falls well short of citywide averages. The 35 students classified as homeless are 0.11 percent of the 31,262 preschool students enrolled in special education.

In the 2016-17 school year, between 31 and 35 homeless preschool students in New York City were receiving special education services, from 17 in the Bronx to none in Staten Island, according to data from NYS Student Information Repository System (SIRS). The data was released by NYS-TEACHS, a project from Advocates for Children, an organization supporting NYC children and groups susceptible to discriminatory policies and actions.

“As the city increases Pre-K and 3-K, the question of why these special education numbers are so low needs to be part of the conversation,” Anna Shaw-Amoah, a policy analyst for ICPH, says.

Process creates hurdles for homeless families

At an October 11, 2017 City Council Education Committee oversight hearing on the DOE’s approach to homeless students, then-Committee Chair Daniel Dromm expressed surprise about the precipitously low rate of homeless preschool special ed students when questioning Advocates for Children Policy Director Randi Levine.

“I think that also the way to help children with special education needs, thinking particularly with speech needs, is that you address them as early on as possible so that you can correct them,” he said. “And if that’s not being done, or if that’s not being caught at Pre-K level, we’re losing a lot of time with these students, and I think by the second grade or third grade we may have already lost them in that sense, and we’ll still provide services, but it’s much more difficult, I think, to do it.”

Levine testified there were likely more homeless pre-K kids in special ed than just the 35 children identified in city data—and that the low number was partly due to the DOE misunderstanding the housing status of certain students. But in an interview with City Limits, she said that homeless students could inadvertently lose out on special education services when families confront a complex evaluation process for assessing the need for special ed coupled with the instability inherent to life in the shelter system.

“It’s easy for children to slip through the cracks and not get timely evaluation,” she says, citing the time-consuming process of getting an Individualized Education Program, or IEP, the legal document that stipulates the services a school must provide for a child in special education. “For preschool students in general, we do see backlogs and delays at the stage of evaluation and at the stage of IEP development. There are particular challenges for certain populations,” including homeless families.

What makes the pre-K special education numbers for homeless students suspect is that, generally, students living in shelters require special- education services at a higher rate than other students, according to a 2016 report on student homeless from the Independent Budget Office.

Homeless students in New York City (and throughout the country) are protected by the McKinney-Vento Homeless Assistance Act, which was passed in 1987 and reauthorized in 2015. It mandates that all educational benefits, including public preschool, are to be provided for homeless children. Part of the challenge in offering special ed for pre-K homeless students is because it can be difficult to determine the need for such services in the first place. Students are protected by the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, which requires schools to provide a “free and appropriate public education” to any child with disabilities. U.S. Department of Education data available from 2014-15 indicated that 13 percent of all public school students were receiving some sort of special-education services.

To discern if services are needed (and if so, what kind) parents must send a “referral” to the CPSE requesting that they begin an IEP evaluation process. In response, the CPSE sends this parent a packet including a list of approved preschool special education evaluation agencies in NYC. The parent chooses an evaluation agency to test whether the student will benefit from services, and the CPSE must hold a meeting within 60 calendar days of the family’s first meeting with the evaluation agency. If the assembled group determines the student will benefit from an IEP, they will draft a plan detailing the students’ abilities and needs, long and short-term measurable goals, and a description of how parents will be notified of their child’s progress.

The process can stymie families in the most stable of situations, and many problems inherent to IEP acquisition can affect housed and homeless families alike. For example, the process can be delayed because of a shortage of bilingual translators. And the DOE’s preschool IEP process is especially challenging because it is spurred by the parents.

“There isn’t adequate support for families, particularly for families who lose their houses and have multiple demands, whereas when a child is in school, the school is responsible for the evaluation process,” Levine says. ‘There still may be challenges, but it is on the school, as opposed to when they’re in a preschool, where it’s parent-driven.”

Throughout the school system, homeless students suffer from late IEP evaluations; 54 percent of homeless students with IEPs received them after kindergarten in the 2015-16 school year, compared to 43 percent of housed students. A late IEP can also hinder educators’ efforts to address developmental delays in a child when it would be most impactful.

The screening process is not the only challenge. Schools often struggle with funding students’ IEPs in their entirety (many argue that the federal government underfunds the cost of properly realizing IDEA). A City Council report on K-12 service funding found that 73 percent of students fully received mandated services in SY 2017-18, with 23 percent partially receiving services and 4 percent not receiving any (though these numbers showed a marked improvement from the previous year, according to the report).

Funding problems aside, special education seems to offer clear benefits to homeless students with developmental delays. According to the ICPH, homeless students who received IEPs earlier were more likely to be successful in school. Those homeless students who did not have IEPs by the end of Kindergarten were twice as likely to be held back as homeless students who received IEPs by that time, and only 9 percentof those students scored proficient on 3rd-grade assessments, in comparison to 17 percent of homeless students who attained IEPs earlier, according to ICPH 2016 data. Students who received IEPs earlier also had lower suspension rates.

City efforts show promise, but work remains

Grand St. Settlement’s early childhood center at 294 Delancey serves 74 pre-K students from throughout the area, and includes a classroom specifically for three-year olds and an “integrated classroom,” enabling students receiving special ed services to learn in the same space as their general education peers.

Ayana Reefe, the center’s Head Start director, said the school runs its own internal screening of students within 45 days of enrollment to see if they might benefit from special ed services. If so, the school will do all it can to help parents craft DOE referrals, and try to assist them in choosing an evaluation agency; the whole endeavor can take up to six months. However, they are serving as support in a process that is designed to be instigated by preschool parents, who must take a more active role in advocating for special education evaluation and services than if their child was in a K-12 setting.

“We go to the meeting with each parent explaining what to expect. If at the meeting they are uncomfortable, they know their due process rights,” she says.

Adi Talwar

The difficult process of determining whether a preschool student could benefit from special education services is all the more challenging for families in temporary housing, according to Gracianna Rosias, a disabilities coordinator at Grand St. Settlement's Child and Family Center. Families face a dizzying and detailed journey and must be their own advocates, she said.

Grand St. touts high rates for getting homeless students early IEPs, if needed; of eight pre-K students with families in temporary housing at the Delancey St. location, three have IEPs (of the seven other homeless families at the organization’s other Manhattan locations, one family had been referred to the DOE, one was in process, and one student had an IEP).

Staff said the most common cause for student turnover was that homeless families had to move to a shelter elsewhere in the city. And that can wreak havoc on an IEP process.

“Shelter families tend to move, and turnover is a lot,” Reefe says. “They might come into your program in September, but due to the fact that the process is lengthy, they can start doing the paperwork then find out a couple of weeks later that they have to move.”

Rosias agrees: “For families who have children in temporary housing, we do remind them that if at any time there is a change, to let us know so we can address them to the appropriate district.”

Though schools, DOE staffers and others often try to assist families, without a stable address communication can be difficult to maintain. Reefe expressed frustration that DOE packets for referrals intended for families are often lost in the mail or sent to a PO Box of the shelter where a family was last purported to reside, and often do not make it into the families’ hands. Joanna Huang, a disabilities and mental-health coordinator, said they try to keep in touch with families who move to a new shelter in order to ensure the process continues unabated.

Levine suggested that the DOE offer families an additional mailing address, such as the preschool in which the student is enrolled, as a more stable option. The Department of Homeless Services has information on where families are situated, and the DOE’s Students in Temporary Housing office can access this data.

“The DOE needs to establish protocols for determining whether preschool-aged children referred for special-education evaluations are living in shelters,” she said. “For example, as one recommendation, when an evaluation for a preschool-aged child is not moving forward and the CPSE staff cannot reach the parent, the CPSE staff should contact the DOE’s Students in Temporary Housing office to determine if the child lives in a shelter and, if so, determine the best way to reach the family.”

A new PATH needed?

The damaged lines of communication with these families risk being further frayed during the initial steps through which families enter the shelter system.

Families attempting to apply for temporary housing do so at the Prevention Assistance and Temporary Housing (PATH) intake center, located a few blocks west of the Grand Concourse on 151st Street in the Bronx. The facility is open 24 hours a day for families needing immediate assistance, and all family members must attend an initial screening. According to the DHS, PATH accepted intakes from 18,000 “unique households” in FY 2016.

At the facility, families meet with a Human Resources Administration caseworker to see if there are any other options for housing besides a shelter, according to DHS information on PATH. Families are temporarily placed in a shelter as DHS determines their eligibility, a process which should not take longer than 10 days. (Some critics, including Councilman Stephen Levin in the October Education Committee hearing, said there were instances where the process could take from 30 to 40 days, though DHS Administrator Joslyn Carter assured Levin these cases were “outliers”.) The DHS did not respond to several requests for comment for this story.

Levine, who testified on behalf of Advocates for Children at the October hearing, said the DOE’s efforts to improve homeless pre-K student enrollment were laudable, citing interagency task forces assembled to increase cooperation among the DOE, DHS and Administration for Children’s Services. However, she said it was difficult for families in shelters to complete an IEP process if they might move one or several times among areas before they are settled. For that reason, some advocates want more detailed resources and information at the PATH center.

“We think that it’s important to have staff at PATH and at the shelters who understand preschool special education, who are able to screen students, and who are are able to talk to parents about when they are in the pre-K special education process, and help them address any barriers to getting those services,” she said.

ICPH policy analyst Anna Shaw-Amoah expressed hope that the DOE’s support for K-12 homeless special education students will filter down to younger students, as well.

“These are families and parents overloaded with challenges and needs, especially at the point of entering a homeless shelter,” she says. “I think what has been successful in the past is putting services where families are, and not requiring additional ‘come to this office’ or ‘come to this location.'”

The DOE operates an office at PATH Monday through Friday from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m., offering educational materials and information about transportation options and additional material for families to consider. DOE Deputy Chancellor of Operations Elisabeth Rose questioned whether PATH was the appropriate place to offer detailed information about students’ education options.

“For families that are losing their homes or entering the shelter system, the intake process of PATH can be a completely overwhelming and stressful process for adults and children. We do not believe that PATH is the ideal location for parents to absorb critical information about their child’s educational future,” she said at the October hearing. “At all shelters families have assigned case workers who are able to address educational needs of their children in a more comfortable setting.”

The Students in Temporary Housing unit, which is part of the DOE’s Office of Safety and Youth Development, employs 10 “content experts” throughout the city that work with schools in each borough, who oversee 117 “family assistants,” which are the primary point of contact for children and families within shelters throughout the city. Schools should follow-up with parents in temporary housing on the status of an IEP evaluation, according to the DOE’s Special Education Standard Operating Procedures Manual.

“If the student had been referred for a special education evaluation but the parent did not sign consent for the evaluation or services, the school should continue to seek consent if the case remains open,” the manual reads. “If the school has any difficulty connecting with a parent, the school should contact the STH Content Expert.”

However, the manual applies only to school-aged students, according to Levine, and the language about students in shelters was a recent addition. She could not recall any written DOE policies or procedures specifically concerning the preschool special ed process for homeless students. Additionally, the number of temporary housing sites, ranging from hotels to conventional shelters, far outnumber the DOE’s 117 family assistants.

“Furthermore…Family Assistants do not have the type of qualifications and training needed to provide the education advocacy that is often needed to overcome barriers,” she says. “That’s why we are recommending that the DOE begin placing social workers at shelters to assist with education rather than increase the number of Family Assistants.”

Preschools face hesitation from some parents

Sitting in her office at the Grand St. Settlement, Reefe said that the lengthy IEP process frustrates and discourages parents.

“It’s already difficult for them; it’s a sensitive topic, for them to even understand their child has a disability,” she says. “(Our staff) get the ball rolling, they do a great job getting these parents to say ‘yes,’ and then it takes six or seven months to get the process going. The parents say ‘you told me all this and there’s no services.'”

The DOE and other advocates hope that the number of homeless preschool students receiving special-education services will rise to match citywide averages as more students are exposed to Head Start programs and early childhood teachers.

Betty Baez Melo, a project director for the Early Childhood Education Project at Advocates for Children, said integrating preschool-aged homeless students into early childhood education, even if special ed services weren’t necessarily available, was a good first step, and the biggest vulnerability remained with children in the shelter system who did not attend preschool at all. According to the ICPH, of the 20,000 homeless three-and-four year olds in New York, more than 4,000 students who could benefit from special ed services were not being reached.

“If we’re talking about access to early childhood education, we want to make sure the most vulnerable children have access to it,” she says. “The students with disabilities and students in temporary housing are the ones who would benefit the most from it.”

However, she also acknowledged that attaining special education services may not be at the forefront of parents’ minds when their housing situation is so unstable.

“It’s a lot to take on; you’re interacting with a family when they’re vulnerable,” Melo says. “Staff must ask “‘Would you be interested in pursuing this as an interest?’ when it’s not their main concern.'”

The staff at Grand St. Settlement touted their collaborations with nearby shelters. Reefe said the partnerships help them bridge gaps with parents, many of whom were worried about disclosing information to new agencies for reasons ranging from documentation status to the anxiety inherent with navigating a family through New York’s shelter system.

“Establishing these relationships is one of the biggest things we can do, because once we explain to case workers what we do, they start calling us to tell us we have a parent who has a concern,” she says. “They’ve got to trust you.”

In a statement sent to City Limits shortly after this story was published, the Department of Homeless Services press secretary Isaac McGinn wrote: “DHS and DOE remain focused on addressing the unique needs of students in temporary housing, which is why we’ve worked together to expand dedicated staffing and programming, established a real-time data feed between the agencies to most effectively provide support to families on the verge of and experiencing homelessness, and released a plan earlier this year that puts people—and students—first by offering those families the opportunity to remain close to their communities and schools, as they get back on their feet. The central goal of the Mayor’s Turning the Tide plan is keeping families and children closer to support networks and schools. While we implement that plan and phaseout the use of all commercial hotel locations, we are working closely with DOE to preserve as much educational stability as possible for our families as they get back on their feet.”

Later on Wednesday, DOE press secretary Toya Holness wrote to City Limits: “We are committed to identifying and meeting the individual needs of all pre-K students with disabilities. Over the past year, we have expanded our support for families in temporary housing with children who may have special education needs — including training shelter staff on special education procedures, making guidance materials available to families at shelters, and using data from DHS to help us maintain contact with families throughout the special education process — to ensure that services are provided without delay.”

Adi Talwar

As the Family Services and Disabilities Junior Coordinator, Joanna Huang and the staff of Grand St. Settlement work with families to help determine if the preschool students under their care could benefit from special education services. The process of attaining an IEP is parent-driven for preschool-aged children; parents must begin the process by submitting their own referral to the DOE.

December 12th, 2017: In the Upper West Side neighborhood of Manhattan, Miriam Rivera in Santa hat speaking with Housing Outreach team from Goddard Riverside Community Center. Rivera has been homeless for three years.

The Upper West Side is still draped in darkness as the headlights from a Toyota Rav4 cut through its sleepy roads. Before the sunrise fills the streets with its warm light, two social workers from Goddard Riverside Community Center’s Homeless Outreach Team are patrolling in the car that’s marked with a “Makes Frequent Stops” bumper sticker. Brian Rodriguez, who’s been with Goddard for six years, is at the wheel while Gavin Wilkinson, a three-year team member, is going down the checklist of client names. They start their outreach shift at 6 a.m., leaving from the Uptown office at 965 Columbus Avenue.

“We can hit Broadway, we got somebody at 90th and Broadway,” Wilkinson said, replying to his partner about where to start.

They pass by the handfuls of morning joggers and garbagemen, but their focus is on the homeless living on the streets. Their heads dart left and right scanning the streets for sleeping bags or scaffolding. While many residents see the city’s metal network of scaffolds as intrusive eyesores, Rodriguez and Wilkinson know they are ripe spots for homeless encampments or hangouts.

The two men are part of the de Blasio administration’s multifaceted effort to address the homelessness crisis, which bedeviled City Hall throughout the mayor’s first term as shelter numbers rose and the presence of street homeless intensified.

Public attention has feasted on the creeping shelter census, violent incidents in homeless facilities and ugly fights in neighborhoods where some residents mounted campaigns to oppose shelter siting. Beyond the spotlight, nonprofit organizations like Goddard Riverside Community Center—an organization that also runs after-school programs for kids and delivers meals to the elderly—are trying to help solve the complex conundrum of housing those who live on the streets. For all the calls for faster action to address the homeless problem, Rodriguez and Wilkinson’s experience demonstrates that getting people housed is a tedious, challenging process involving reluctant clients and limited housing supply.

Rodriguez and Wilkinson cover the early morning shift, finishing at 1:30 p.m. before being relieved by the night or weekend team. They are all part of Goddard’s uptown outreach efforts that spans 59th to 110th Streets, from river to river. The team is mostly tasked with engaging folks on the streets to ensure their immediate health and safety, but with the ultimate goal of getting them into some form of housing. And the first step part of that arduous process begins with their persistent outreach.

They know to look for public parks around Lincoln Center and Verdi Square that offer benches for the homeless to set up. And while the stone walls that border Central Park may seem mundane to passersby, Rodriguez and Wilkinson know to peek just over the park wall to see if anyone is sleeping atop the subway grates that radiate residual heat from the tunnels below.

They use a similar approach with many of the clients they encounter on a daily basis. They begin with a greeting and inform the person on the street that they’re part of the city’s Homeless Outreach team. They continue by asking how they’re doing, if they need anything at the moment, and if they’re interested in getting housing.

The clients the teams interact with are usually those who have chosen not to enter the city’s shelter system, whether because of bad past experiences involving theft or violence or refusing to enter at all because of the shelters’ reputation or other qualms. Their clients tend to differ from the families with children—many of them working people–who make up the bulk of the shelter population. Goddard Riverside’s outreach team only targets those who choose to be on the streets, and those are mostly individual adults who have had long stretches of life on the margins.

The responses the team receives vary. Clients who haven’t eaten in a while may request a bagel and something to drink, and those familiar with the outreach team will engage in discussions that resemble those of friends catching up after a long absence. But some clients are resistant, either ignoring the outreach team altogether or slinging expletives their way so they can be left alone to sleep.

“We get cursed out often and we have clients that don’t want to be woken up,” Rodriguez said.

For the difficult few, Wilkinson said they still check in on them, especially in colder weather and if they have certain medical needs.

“If they reject us, we still outreach to them weekly to see if they change their minds, offer them coffee,” Wilkinson said. “But rejection is something we’re immune to.”

Through countless interactions with the same folks, the outreach workers are able to develop friendships or enough rapport where the client can trust them. Rodriguez is often chatting with those who speak Spanish and others have asked for Wilkinson personally when approached by other teams as they often chat on a first-name basis. Many of the people they encounter recognize them and are thankful for their consistent desire to house them.

“I have no words. They are angels,” Miriam Rivera, who’s been living on the streets of the Upper West Side for three years, said. “I know all the programs because they help me. I’m very, very grateful for them…they [taught] me that you have to look for help.”

Rivera said she’s visited daily by either Wilkinson or another Goddard outreach member and that she’s hoping to live in Section 8 housing eventually.

Once the hard part of getting a street-homeless person to accept help is over, the outreach team then creates a file that logs how long they’ve been on the streets, where they usually sleep, and if they have any forms of identification. A social worker continues to check in with them until they’re added to the caseload where they can be helped with social services, like SNAP benefits and health insurance. And if all goes according to plan, the client will complete a housing packet and wait for an opportunity for a housing interview. The interview offers an opportunity for the client and housing providers to see if the placement and accompanying social services would be a good fit.

But the process is rarely that smooth as there are many difficulties in getting a hold of folks without a permanent address.

On the recent morning, when Rodriguez approached a group of homeless people outside a church that offers food and showers, Carlos Batista remembered the Goddard team member. Rodriguez said Batista had been on the way to being filed into the system but he suddenly fell off their map when he moved from his previous location due to nearby construction. Now that they’ve been reunited, there is the issue of scheduling a time to meet so that Rodriguez can restart Batista’s housing process. With no home, Batista said he’s not sure where he’ll be tomorrow, but he can meet by the benches on Broadway around the morning. The uncertain appointment is hardly reassuring but, for Rodriguez, it’s worth the effort of checking.

“Sometimes they just won’t be there or they’ll be somewhere else,” Rodriguez said of trying to find clients. “That’s where some of the frustrations lay, but you just keep it pushing, keep moving. You can’t really fixate on one particular client you can’t find because there’s a whole bunch of other clients that need help.”

The Goddard workers understand that getting their clients into housing is a struggle that requires plenty of patience. According to Goddard Riverside’s statistics, so far this year the day team has had 7,787 interactions with homeless people in their area as of December 16. Combined with the night team’s numbers of 16,318, the entire uptown outreach efforts have tallied more than 24,105 contacts with clients so far this year.

While the interaction teams have racked up high counts, getting their clients into housing is a different story. This year, they’ve only gotten 151 people into some form of housing, according to the organization’s statistics. They also housed 169 people last year, making for a total of 313 homeless brought off the streets.

The obstacle course begins with the time-consuming outreach process, where a homeless individual can need anything from a few visits to numerous years of contact before agreeing to get help. But the hurdles continue as most of them also have preferences of where they’d like to be or where they want to avoid.

“Clients who have been in city shelters don’t necessarily want to stay there because of how traumatic it is,” Rodriguez said, explaining stories of frequent robberies. “When they leave and they’re on their own, … they don’t want all that, they just want a place for themselves.”

While any homeless person who agrees to go inside can be placed quickly into immediate housing in the form of a church bed or transitional housing, most of them prefer to wait for an actual apartment to open up, according to the uptown outreach team’s program director Keri Goldwyn. But the city’s low amount of affordable housing stock proves to be another difficulty for her teams, Goldwyn added. Even when they get to the last step of finding a housing interview, there’s no guarantee of housing availability.

“At this point, even getting interviews has been kind of dry across the board for all of our teams,” Goldwyn said, referring to the meetings clients need to have with housing providers before getting a space.

When asked about the large difference between the contact numbers and the amount of housing placements, Goldwyn said her team is putting a ton of effort into getting people housed, but that there’s a “climate of limited opportunities…given what’s out there.”

“We can outreach all day and night, but if we don’t have housing for them, there’s not much more we can do for them,” Rodriguez said.

The city is doing a substantial amount of work on this front. According to the Department of Homeless Services, Goddard’s outreach team is one of three Manhattan outreach organizations, who are all managed by the Manhattan Outreach Consortium and has a $11.3 million annual contract with the city for homeless outreach. Several other groups cover the remaining boroughs and the subway system, totaling $38 million for the city’s spending on outreach programs. The city also launched HOME-STAT, a network that connects all the homeless outreach organizations, in April 2016. With the new program, the city is working on creating a name list of all street-homeless individuals and their accompanying files to expedite providing assistance to them.

The city’s homeless agency says the de Blasio administration has doubled the city’s funding for street homeless programs, from more than $41 million in 2014 to $91 million in 2018. The doubling down has equated to bringing 865 people off the streets in the last year, according to DHS. Mayor Bill de Blasio also announced on December 12 that the city will work with nonprofit organizations in converting “cluster site” buildings, where many homeless families stay in run-down apartments, into permanent affordable housing units.

However, groups like Coalition for the Homeless feel there is much more that needs to be done to fully address the growing homelessness issue. According to the nonprofit advocacy group’s report, there were 62,963 homeless people reported in city shelters as of October 2017. The numbers have stabilized a little as last year’s October count showed 62,306 homeless in shelters, but just five years ago in October, there were only 48,694 homeless individuals counted in city shelters.

According to Jacquelyn Simone, a policy analyst with the coalition, the city has ramped up its efforts to tackle homelessness, but the pace still needs to quicken.

“We are hopeful that the historic commitments to affordable housing made by the city and the state will help to alleviate some of that supply-side issue as those units come online,” Simone said, referring to the proposed affordable housing developments. “However we really do need to accelerate the timeline given the record needs we see on the streets and in the shelters.”

Simone said the homelessness solution of providing more housing has always been on the table, but that people need to be holding those in office more accountable for making good on their promise.

Meanwhile, the Goddard Riverside team is still making their early morning rounds. For the outreach workers, it’s a particularly draining process trying to change someone’s life for the better and to face multiple barriers along the way. But they say they are undeterred as they know the end result of getting someone in a safe, secure home is worth the struggles they face trying to house the homeless.

“Ultimately, we’re trying to improve their lives,” Wilkinson said. “You hear all the sad stories, but at the end of the tunnel, we’re trying to create that light for them. You just focus on that light at the end.”

On January 3, each of the 51 city councilmembers will cast a vote to choose the colleague among them who will lead their pack. The position of City Council Speaker holds significant power to shape the Council’s legislative priorities and handle negotiations with the executive branch. Occupied by Christine Quinn for eight years under Mayor Bloomberg and by Melissa Mark-Viverito during Mayor de Blasio’s first term, the position will now go to one of eight men vying for the position (though rumors are that one of the candidates is about to drop out of the race).

It’s not clear how much average New Yorkers’ opinion matters for this internal election. Political commentators have predicted that the results of the Speaker’s election will in fact be dictated from on high, with councilmembers likely to pledge their votes according to the choice of county Democratic leaders, perhaps under a deal brokered with the mayor. That, however, hasn’t stopped labor and tenant groups from organizing in favor of particular candidates. And it shouldn’t stop a public discussion about the differences between the candidates.

City Limits used several methods to evaluate where the eight candidates stand on questions of housing and land use. It’s clear from this analysis that the candidates share similar positions on a number of fronts, but some differences also emerged.

Introducing the candidates

The first chart offers an introduction to the candidates based on two sources: their introductory speech at the televised NY1 debate on December 1, and a Q&A we sent to all the candidates and due on December 11 (only Williams and Rodriguez responded).

Councilmember

District

Candidate introductions

Ydanis Rodriguez

Manhattan (Washington Heights, Inwood, Marble Hill) – 10

12/11/2017 e-mail to City Limits: “One of my top priorities is to reduce the number of homeless people in our City. I want to spread information informing tenants about their rights. Gentrification has been happening last 20 years; housing prices are increasing as I write these lines creating the biggest housing crisis in the entire nation. One of my top priorities is to confront landlords that take advantages of tenants by using different tactics to intimidate and make them leave their apartments, to reduce this from happening I want increase tenant protection from property owner harassment and unlawful rents.” Also mentioned on NY1 that he has been fighting for affordable housing.

On NY1, said that as zoning chair he helped shepherd in “landmark legislation” including MIH and ZQA, worked with colleagues to shape other plans and had brought through a record amount of affordable housing projects.

On NY1, said he grew up in public housing, in poor conditions, and wants to defend such public institutions.

Jumaane Williams

Brooklyn (Flatbush, East Flatbush, Flatlands, Midwood, Canarsie) – 45

12/11/2017 e-mail to City Limits: ” First of all, we need to be using all the tools in the toolbox to combat this affordable housing and homelessness crisis. Too often, we look at them as separate problems when in reality, they’re part of the same problem. We need to establish a mandatory minimum amount of deeply affordable housing in each proposal.” On NY1, said he voted against MIH “which didn’t go far enough” but was still able to work with the mayor.

On NY1, mentioned public housing’s physical and financial distress and that he helped to pass Right to Counsel legislation (he was leading sponsor, with co-sponsor Vanessa Gibson also playing a key role).

On NY1, said he experienced homelessness as a kid; and we need a Speaker who can fight for families like the one he grew up in.

The mayor’s housing plan

In this chart, we first examine the candidates’ stances on the de Blasio administration’s mandatory inclusionary zoning policy, or MIH—the most significant citywide housing policy decision on which the Council has had a voice. We rely on two sources: answers to the Q&A e-mailed by City Limits, and the candidates’ remarks on March 22, 2016, when the Council voted on the proposed policy.

MIH requires that developers granted an upzoning make a percentage of the housing “affordable,” with the Council allowed to choose the affordability scheme for each rezoned area from among four possible rent-level options. Thanks to “member deference,” local councilmembers have the ability to choose the rent level option for projects in their district. While the Council made changes to the policy, including adding a new option at lower rent levels, critics say even the council’s revised version did not go far enough to address the housing crisis for the poorest New Yorkers. 42 councilmembers voted for the proposal, including all but one of the candidates: Williams was one of five councilmembers who voted against the proposal.

The chart also looks at the candidates’ stances on just how much affordable housing should be targeted to the lowest income New Yorkers—those making below 50 percent Area Median Income, which is roughly $40,000 for a family of three. Our sources are the City Limits Q&A and the November 30 debate on housing issues held by Metro-IAF, a coalition of faith-based organizations representing many New Yorkers of color. Williams, Johnson, Levine and Cornegy attended the debate; the other four were invited but did not attend.

Finally, we’ve included the answers to our Q&A question on the use of public land for housing development. (Only Williams responded.)

Councilmember

Position on MIH

What percent of city-subsidized affordable housing should be set aside for families making less than $40,000? (Or 50% Area Median Income)

Would you lead a citywide discussion about what kind of development should take place on all public land, and if so, what do you think should be considered in that discussion?

Ydanis Rodriguez

On 3/22/2016, said he recognizes a lot of working class New Yorkers are at risk of being displaced and are asking “will this plan work?” He is confident it will: “We are making a historic vote to provide opportunities to create affordable housing for the working class and middle class.” On 12/11/2017, wrote to City Limits: “The mandatory inclusionary housing policy is an initial tool to build affordable housing, but when we have the opportunity to work in any rezoning we have to make sure that we add public funding, so that we can increase the percentage of affordable housing. At this moment we have to give time to the mandatory inclusionary housing policy see how it works, later on in the future the Council body should make an evaluation to see if it needs any modifications.”

12/11/2017 :”Even though we established a 25 percent of units built or preserved to families making below 50 percent AMI, it’s difficult to find an average percentage. In NYC each council [sic] has to deal with its own reality when it comes to increase the percentage of affordable housing by income. If I become the Speaker I will support all council members to negotiate the highest percentage using the average income of the District they represent.”

Robert Cornegy

3/22/2016: Aye (no other comment)

11/30/2017: At least 30 percent of the housing stock should be “affordable”. But we can only know what we need after conducting a full, thorough assessment of all the types of affordable housing units in the city and an assessment of what regulatory agreements are sunsetting.

Donovan Richards

3/22/2016: The proposal had a lot of “issues” at first, but “we worked hard to find a middle ground that would provide both a solution to the city’s affordable housing crisis while also serving as an incentive to reinvigorate new life into neighborhoods that have been left neglected for years like East New York & Far Rockaway.” MIH is important because the city need more units of housing, more units people can afford; and it means city is now requiring developers to pay for affordable housing. Council has also secured a number of other commitments from the administration.

Corey Johnson

3/22/2016: “While neither of these bills is extremely perfect, they represent a tremendous opportunity to create affordable homes for thousands of New Yorkers…”. On MIH, Council “negotiated important changes” like deeper affordability, eliminating the removal of sliver lot protections (that prevent narrow tall buildings on narrow streets), preventing across-the-board height increases for market-rate developments in Manhattan, securing commitments from the administration related to anti-harrassment work, and more.

11/30/2017: Agrees with Williams that there should be a matching of units to need. “If people in poverty, homeless individuals is at certain percentage, we need to be shooting to that percentage.” Not sure the number yet, likely in the 30-40% range, but “I need to do my homework on this one”

Ritchie Torres

3/22/2016: A lot of people have “palpable anxiety that this plan does not go far enough” but he disagrees because MIH is “meant to be a foundation” and the city can work for deeper affordability. “Don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good…don’t let the perfect stand in the way of making history.” Added: “I do have Fair Housing Concerns.” But feels the pluses outweigh the negatives.

Jumaane Williams

3/22/2016: Voting no. “I think it is a very good plan for those of us that welcome low-income units into our communities, but there is no mandate for those who have historically rejected low-income units in their district…I believe a mandatory minimum in all of the options…would have been good.” On 12/11/2017, wrote to City Limits: “I ultimately voted against MIH because I felt it didn’t go far enough– now, with the Mayor’s new initiatives for affordable housing, and now that we’ve put out new term sheets, we are making progress, but we’ve lost time. We need to review and revise MIH to mandate a certain amount of deeply affordable housing in all rezonings.”

11/30/2017: Housing plan should match what city looks like: about 45 percent of city are in the lowest income brackets. But we also have to count the people doubled or tripled up, so at least 45 percent. 12/11/2017: “Just over 40 (41.4 percent) of housing should be targeted at families below 50 percent AMI.” [According to the Association for Neighborhood and Housing Development, 41.4 percent of households make less than 50 percent AMI.]

12/11/2017: “I would be honored to lead this discussion as Speaker, the point of the discussion being to hear from all people. The goal would of course be to get the biggest possible return for the public on that land. I also feel it would be valuable to strongly consider nonprofit developers.”

3/22/2016: Praises Council Land Use staff for compiling all the concerns of his community boards, and writing a response to every single concern. “I’m enormously proud of this body for having taken the time to register every single complaint, every single concern, and then to have gone back and responded in print to every single concern…which I then have already gone back and spoken to the community boards with. That’s an enormous amount of responsiveness that I don’t think you would normally see in something this important.” Voting in favor because of great need for affordable housing for seniors in his district.

Public housing and homelessness

This chart looks at the answers candidates offered to questions about NYCHA and homelessness at the Metro-IAF November 30 debate.

To several questions, their answers were similar. Asked how many extra billions they would put in NYCHA’s budget to deal with repairs, Williams and Johnson both said they would dedicate more funds to NYCHA, but couldn’t give a specific figure (Levine wasn’t directly prompted to answer the question and Cornegy was not present at the time).

Williams, Johnson and Levine also expressed support for the creation of a new construction authority, as suggested by Metro-IAF, that is focused on NYCHA repairs. (Cornegy wasn’t present.) And when asked by organizers whether they approved of the mayor’s plan to roll back homelessness by 1 percent annually or 2,500 people over four years, and what their goal would be, everyone followed Levine’s suggestion of a 50 percent rollback—though the timeframe was not clear.

Metro-IAF also sought a commitment from the candidates to their goal of building 15,000 units of affordable senior housing on NYCHA or other city-owned vacant lots. All four candidates agreed to that goal, though later on Levine did note that he wanted to work hand in hand with NYCHA residents and not have anything built without residents’ consensus.

Their answers differed more significantly when they discussed the lead paint scandal—the fact that NYCHA had falsely certified to the federal government that it had been in compliance with lead paint inspection requirements—with Williams and Cornegy appearing to be more willing to challenge the tenure of NYCHA’s chair Shola Olatoye. They also had differing answers to the question of how many units in the mayor’s housing plan should be set aside for families making below $40,000, with Williams offering the biggest number. He also called for the consolidation of the housing and homelessness plans, with the elimination of one commissioner or deputy mayor.

Johnson, at a few points, tried to offer a realist’s perspective: He was the one who reminded the room that it’s up to the state to create a construction authority, and so the next Speaker would need to lobby Albany. As for the 15,000 units, Johnson said it was not something he could do on his own: “I want to be honest, I don’t just want to pander…whoever the speaker is cannot wave a magic wand and force the mayor to do anything. So what this is going to take is inside agitators and the speaker should be working with outside agitators,” he said.

Councilmember

Should NYCHA chairwoman Shola Olatyoe resign over the lead paint scandal?

Do you support the mayor’s goal to reduce homelessness by 1% (annually) or 2500 people (in four years)? What would be your goal?

Robert Cornegy

If she literally lied to federal government, “she can no longer serve with any confidence in that role”

Noted a “crisis in leadership” and the devaluation of NYCHA residents’ lives but did not call for Shola Olatoye’s resignations specifically.

We need to improve shelter conditions. Agrees with Levine’s goals.

Jumaane Williams

It depends on the answers to two questions: Did Olatoye know about this? And did she only bring this up after the media found out? If so she has to go.

There should be a consolidation of the housing and homelessness plans and the elimination of one deputy mayor and/or one commissioner position. Agrees with Levine’s goals.

Mark Levine

Spoke to need for accountability for NYCHA residents but did not call for Olatoye’s resignation.

Shelter census must be rolled back at least 50 percent, to Bloomberg-era levels at the least.

Rezoning and member deference

Using answers to the City Limits Q&A, we looked at the candidates’ stances on neighborhood rezonings.

We also looked at the candidate’s responses at the NY1 debate to the question of whether they would continue the practice of “member deference,” in which all other councilmembers defer to the local councilmember’s decision on land-use projects in their district. Advocates say the informal policy recognizes the councilmember’s local knowledge and provides a councilmember with backing during negotiations with developers, while critics say it allows “NIMBY-ism” (Not In My Back Yard!) to triumph over citywide goals.

Most of the councilmembers said they would continue the practice of local deference, but Richards and Williams both stressed the importance of the speaker using their leadership to help the body make difficult decisions about citywide goals. Williams, in particular, has a history of being a dissenting, activist voice when he feels a project doesn’t live up to citywide goals, and recently released a vision for the next four years that includes giving the Council more land use powers.

Councilmember

A number of city-sponsored neighborhood rezonings may be coming down the pipeline in the next couple years, including Jerome Avenue, Bay Street, Gowanus, Inwood, Long Island City, and Southern Boulevard. What is your biggest concern and/or biggest hope about the mayor’s rezoning plans?

Will you preserve the policy of member deference?

Ydanis Rodriguez

12/11/2017: “My biggest hope is to see the entire community fully engaged in this process. I hope that future rezoning projects will create economic development and support local businesses. I’m confident that the rezoning of these areas will generate thousands of jobs for local residents and affordable housing units for the low income ones. I also hope to see an increase in the implementation of youth programming, arts and cultural organizations.”

Defended member deference and said he’d provide support Councilmembers to make the best decisions. Says Department of City Planning should be alerting councilmembers of projects coming through the pipeline.

Robert Cornegy

Defended member deference.

Donovan Richards

Believes in member deference, but there are times when the Speaker has to show leadership, especially over the next four years when there will be controversial decisions to make over things like homeless shelter sitings, housing density and Rikers.

Corey Johnson

Supports deference, but says Council needs a larger land-use planning staff so it can be more proactive at beginning of process.

Ritchie Torres

Defended member deference.

Jumaane Williams

12/11/2017: “My biggest concern is making sure that we have a mandatory amount of deeply affordable housing, which could also have the benefit of helping to break down segregated areas and segregated schools.”

Notes he has been less deferent than others, sometimes voting or abstaining on projects. Believes in member deference but says sometimes deference runs afoul of other goals, such as fair share in the distribution of jails and shelters and creating more deeply affordable housing. Leadership is required to push difficult conversations. Says he’s very concerned about segregation through the creation of affordable housing; thus why he voted against MIH and was in favor of less member-deference in that policy. Mentions he’s released a vision paper, which includes allowing the Council more authority to initiate land use projects so land use planning is not just in the hands of the mayor.

Mark Levine

“There are extreme cases where we might not defer to the local member. That hasn’t happened in the last four years”

James Van Bramer

Defended member deference.

Legislative accomplishments

This chart quantifies the number of bills and resolutions introduced to the Housing and Buildings Committee or the Public Housing Committee within the Council by each candidate during the last four years, and provides a few examples of such bills. You can see full lists of those bills, by candidate, here. Oftentimes it’s the councilmembers who belong to a committee who submit the most bills to that committee, though Cornegy and Richards were exceptions, with Cornegy submitting few bills to the Housing and Buildings Committee on which he sits, and Richards submitting none to the Public Housing Committee, of which he’s also a member. Richards, it should be noted, has had a major role in shaping land-use deals over the past few years as the chair of the council’s Subcommittee on Zoning and Franchises—and those efforts don’t show up in the legislative count. The chart does not include Levine’s landmark legislation establishing a right to counsel.

Councilmember

Housing related committees they’re on

# of bills and resolutions primary sponsored in Housing and Buildings or Public Housing Committees last term

# of bills primary sponsored enacted in that committee

Examples of key bills

Ydanis Rodriguez

Housing and Buildings, Task Force on Affordable Housing Preservation

13

4

Sponsored a bill, already passed by the council, that increases transparency regarding city’s assistance to developers and another bill that requires annual reports on the state of gas infrastructure. The council has not yet passed his bill requiring an annual census of the city’s vacant properties, or his resolution calling on NYCHA to prioritize applicants with severe health conditions.

Robert Cornegy

Housing and Buildings

3

0

Has sponsored a bill, not yet passed, that would require landlords making buyouts to disclose the number of months of rent the buyout offer would likely cover.

Donovan Richards

Public Housing

9

3

Sponsored a bill, already enacted, that requires the city to produce a report on the affordable housing fund. Anotjher bill, not yet passed, would allow the city to form regulatory agreements with community land trusts, while another still under consideration would require the roofs of certain buidlings to be partially covered in plants or solar panels.

Corey Johnson

8

3

Sponsored a bill, already passed, which limits when hotels can be converted to condos. Another bill, not yet passed, would protect tenants with pets from eviction under certain circumstances.

Ritchie Torres

Housing and Buildings, Public Housing – Chair

26

8

Legislation he sponsored and shepherded successfully through Council include bills requiring a watchlist of buildings subject to speculation, requiring reporting on NYCHA social service programs, and a resolution urging HUD to exclude New York City from the new “Small Area Fair Market Rents” rule that would have changed how section 8 subsidies were calculated. A bill that has not yet passed would create a rebuttable presumption” regarding harrassment, meaning that for certain kinds of predatory equity buildings the onus is put on landlords to defend themselves from harassment charges. And many more.

Sponsored and passed legislation requiring construction safety training, a bill increasing the penalties for harassment, and a bill requiring the city to conduct audits of buildings receiving the 421-a tax credit to determine whether they are in compliance with rent regulations. Another bill, still pending, would require the installation of “anemometers” to improve safety of crane use; yet another would require city to establish a program to provide legal services to evicted or foreclosed disabled New Yorkers. And many more…

Mark Levine

Task Force on Affordable Housing Preservation – Co-chair

10

3

Sponsored legislation, already enacted, that strengthens the requirements in tenant protection plans for buildings undergoing construction (part of the Stand for Tenant Safety package).Another bill, not yet enacted, would require the city to create rules regarding succession rights for tenants living in Tenant Interim Lease buildings, while yet another still under consideration would require the city to report on regulatory agreements with Housing Development Fund companies.

James Van Bramer

Public Housing

6

0

Sponsored a resolution, not yet passed, that calls on state to require licensing for those involved in the building and repairing of elevators and other people-moving devices. Also sponsored a bill that would make it easier for family members of deceased NYCHA tenants to obtain succession rights.

Donations from real estate

We looked at each of the councilmembers’ donations from the last election season and used search+find to uncover every donation labelled “real estate,” “realtor,” “realty,” “architect,” “architecture,” “construction,” “properties,” “developer,” “development,” or “property management” under name, occupation or firm. We double checked that those that fell under developer or development weren’t referring to non-real estate entities, and excluded construction unions and nonprofit affordable housing developers when we could, because while such entities are engaged in real estate development, they are not profit-driven and in some (though not all) cases have in fact been major critics of redevelopment projects like neighborhood rezonings. We also corrected completely obvious mistakes when we spotted them, such as the inclusion of donations from employees of the School Construction Authority. Finally, we added in any donations from those who listed their employer as one of the top twenty developers, as ranked by NY Curbed in 2014, or who is the head of that company or their spouse.

Granted, it’s an imperfect method—one that will sweep up architects who are really just academics, construction-firm workers who are also anti-displacement activists, and real-estate agents not seeking to influence politics. It also doesn’t distinguish between a candidate who receives hefty donations from big developers and candidates who receive many smaller donations from local construction contractors, small-time realtors, and the like.

Ranked by raw dollars, Johnson received the most donations from real estate. It’s possible this could be because he is considered the front runner in the race for speaker by some and represents one of the hottest real-estate markets in the city. It’s also true that he received a boost from real estate donors, though much less support than in this past election, when he first ran in 2013, and that he worked in real estate: for the Wall Street firm GFI Development Corporation from 2008 to 2010 and a stint for a hotel developer. Van Bramer, who represents the hot real-estate market of Long Island City, comes second.

Ranked by percent of donations out of total donations received, it’s actually Richards who leads over Johnson—not surprising, given the power he holds as chair of the Subcommittee on Zoning and Franchises.*

Councilmember

Total donations

Real Estate donations

Percentage of total donations

Ydanis Rodriguez

$255,422.51

$9,880.00

4 percent

Robert Cornegy

$184,730.00

$11,380.00

6 percent

Donovan Richards

$171,598.49

$30,120.00

18 percent

Corey Johnson

$505,818.00

$62,750.00

12 percent

Ritchie Torres

$264,819.00

$29,100.00

11 percent

Jumaane Williams

$226,783.83

$11,220.00

5 percent

Mark Levine

$439,110.35

$40,470.00

9 percent

James Van Bramer

$522,898.00

$53,634.00

10 percent

Projects of significance

Using LUCATs, the city’s database of land use applications, and referencing media coverage land use and zoning issues, we highlighted a significant land use project in each district. It’s not the best method for making direct comparisons because the varying density and demographics of each district mean each councilmember faces his own unique set of pressures. But it does give a sense of the land-use issues that have preoccupied these councilmembers recently.

Councilmember

Projected in their districts & their voting record

Ydanis Rodriguez

In 2016, voted against an upzoning for the Sherman Plaza project, which would have granted the developer additional floors in exchange for making 20 percent of the apartments affordable to people making 40 percent Area Median Income, 10 percent for families making 60 percent AMI and 20 percent for families making 110-135 percent AMI, according to the Municipal Arts Society. After community opposition to the project, which locals said would be too high at 17-stories or was not deeply enough affordable, he rejected the project. At recent NY1 debate, justified his decision by arguing that this was a “spot rezoning” but that he is now working with the community and the de Blasio administration to craft a comprehensive neighborhood rezoning of Inwood. That larger plan, however, also faces opposition from some residents.

Robert Cornegy

This summer approved 1618 Fulton Street, which will merge three city-owned lots with two private-owned lots for the construction of an 11-story building. 103 residential units for incomes ranging from 60 percent to 130 percent AMI, according to DNAinfo. Cornegy negotiated for the inclusion of four below-market leases for small businesses. It will be developed by BFC Partners and SMJ Development, a Minority Owned business partner.

Donovan Richards

Spearheaded and negotiated with the administration on the rezoning of Downtown Far Rockaway, the second neighborhood rezoning under the de Blasio administration (and one of the less controversial ones). Rezoning is expected to bring over 3,000 units to the area. City aims to develop an abandoned stretch of blocks with 100 percent income-targeted (though that’s not a definite guarantee).

Corey Johnson

Negotiated for and lead the council to approve the St. John’s Terminal development. The developers, Westbrook Partners and Atlas Capital Group, agreed to pay the city $100 million for Pier 40 air rights, with the money to be used for repairs to the pier. The redevelopment will be a commercial and residential complex with 1,500 apartments, including 500 at below-market rates. According to DNAinfo, the developers were exempt from following the city’s mandatory inclusionary housing law but agreed to provide 10 percent of total units to families making 60 percent AMI, 5 percent to families making 80 percent AMI, 5 percent to people making 110 percent AMI, and 10 percent to people making 130 percent AMI. Johnson also secured a number of community benefits including the designation of a historic preservation district nearby as part of the deal with the administration.

Ritchie Torres

Worked out deal with Phipps and de Blasio administration for the $600 million revamp of Lambert Houses, a section 8 building. According to Phipps, each part of Lambert will be demolished and rebuilt, the existing residents will be relocated within the buildings so no one is displaced, and there will be more than 900 new units built.* In all, there will be 1,665 units, of which over 700 are expected to be covered by federal section 8 vouchers and serve a range of incomes, with set asides specifically for homeless families and families making 40 percent and 50 percent AMI. Another quarter will serve families making between 80 percent and 100 percent AMI, and more than a quarter will serve families around 60 percent AMI, though those targets could change based on changes to city programs. The de Blasio administration also committed to other investments, including two new schools, according to Bronx Times.

Jumaane Williams

According to LUCATs there were no significant land-use projects requiring Council approval in Williams’ district over these past four years.

Mark Levine

In May, he led the Council to approve the Morningside Heights Historic District, a 115-building area believed to have architectural and historical significance. At the Landmarks Preservation Commissions’ hearing on the proposal, most people supported it with the exception of two religious institutions and Columbia University, which did not want to foreclose opportunities for renovations or redevelopment, according to DNAinfo.

James Van Bramer

Refused to lend support to a Phipps affordable housing project; said at NY1 debate that it was because the non-profit developer wouldn’t work with the labor union 32BJ. At the time he also said residents were opposed to the height of the building (10 stories at highest point) and the rent levels of the units (targetting families making between 50 to 130 percent AMI), according to NY Curbed. Van Bramer will have several key land-use decisions ahead of him in the next few years, including a potential rezoning of Long Island City and the redevelopment of a publicly owned plot of land north of Hunters Point South.

*Corrections: Previously misstated that Donovan Richards chairs the Land Use Committee. He chairs the Subcommittee on Zoning and Franchises. In the section about land use projects, accidentally stated that the existing residents of Lambert Houses would not be relocated within the buildings during the renovation. In fact, the buildings will be sequentially demolished and rebuilt, but tenants will be relocated in the buildings and will not be displaced.

Teresa, who faced addiction issues and a stint in prison, credits the Alliance with helping her start a new life – in a new home.

Nonprofit launches #PositiveHomes campaign to raise $5,000 to assemble 50 home improvement kits for the formerly homeless or incarcerated; Board Member Allen Zwickler and Ellen Pikitch step up to match first $2,500

(New York, N.Y.)— Remember your first apartment, the first time you were out on your own? That feeling of accomplishment and self-worth, that you were embarking on a new, exciting chapter in your life?

The Alliance for Positive Change recognizes the value of independence and the ability to start anew. That’s why the 27-year-old nonprofit has launched a new campaign—#PositiveHomes for the Holidays – to help the New Yorkers it serves start fresh and turn a house into a home this holiday season. The campaign aims to raise $5,000 by January.

#PositiveHomes equips New Yorkers who have just escaped homelessness with some of the most basic tools they need as they move into supportive housing. Items such as bed linens, kitchen utensils, toiletries such as soap and shampoo, and even scarves and gloves for the approaching winter season.

“At the Alliance, we believe that everyone should have a second chance to feel better, live better, and do better, particularly during the holiday season,” says Sharen I. Duke, Founding Executive Director and CEO of The Alliance for Positive Change. “We make sure that people who are confronted with HIV/AIDS, chronic health conditions, and substance use addiction can take positive steps, and often that begins with finding a stable, permanent place to live.”

“But,” she adds, “we recognize that a roof over one’s head is simply not enough, that building a future requires more assistance. And that is where #PositiveHomes comes in.”

Throughout the years, the Alliance has routinely assisted many of its program participants – who have faced homelessness or housing insecurity, or are reentering society after serving sentences – by providing blankets, kitchen items, and other necessities to help them start anew.

The Alliance is asking for support to raise $5,000 to fund #PositiveHomes kits, and has launched a fundraising site on Crowdrise: https://www.crowdrise.com/o/en/team/positive-homes. Already, Alliance Board Member Allen Zwickler and his wife Ellen Pikitch have promised to match the first $2,500 donated.

Teresa, who faced addiction issues and a stint in prison, credits the Alliance with helping her start a new life – in a new home.

“Getting my own apartment in the Alliance’s Pelham Grand Supportive Housing Program is the first sense of normalcy I’ve ever had – a dramatic change after living on the street for years. The Alliance believed in me, cared about me, and helped me get my life on track,” she says. “I continue to be in recovery and stay clean. I am very serious about change. Thanks to the Alliance’s amazing support system and my own hard work, for the first time in my life, I am experiencing success.”

About The Alliance for Positive ChangeThe Alliance for Positive Change transforms lives of New Yorkers living with HIV/AIDS and other chronic illnesses. We help people access medical care, manage and overcome addiction, escape homelessness, get back to work, and find community. By addressing the underlying issues that contribute to poor health, the Alliance’s individualized, full-service approach and harm reduction philosophy help New Yorkers lead healthier, more self-sufficient lives. At the Alliance, we believe everyone deserves the chance to feel better, live better, and do better. Learn more at www.alliance.nyc.